-Our first guest tonight is an Emmy-nominated
and Golden Globe award-winning actor
you know from films such as "Moulin Rouge"
and the "Star Wars" prequels
as well as his work in the FX series "Fargo."
He's currently starring in "Halston" on Netflix.
Let's take a look.
-Halston, these are not bad. -They're not good.
-Yes, this one is. "Effortless and elegant,
Halston is an exciting new voice in women's fashion."
-Well..."The look they've assembled here
is thrown together or contrived."
-Well, which is it, Bernadine Mars,
thrown together or contrived?"
-This one says, "'You're either young or old,' says Halston."
-Well, that's neither good nor bad.
That's just a quote. He never, ever gets to talk.
-Please welcome back to the show Ewan McGregor.
Hello, Ewan! -Hey. How are you?
-I'm doing very well. It's lovely to see you again.
-It's nice to see you, too.
-Now I want to talk about "Halston,"
but I want to talk about some of your work
that I became familiar with over the pandemic that you,
I guess, have been doing for a long time,
which is narrating nature documentaries for BBC Scotland.
How did that come about? -Yeah.
I can't remember.
I was approached by the director of them.
Um...and I started doing these narrations.
And because it's Scotland, it's so close to --
[ Video glitching ]
...I just loved sitting there in the recording booth,
looking at these beautiful images of my homeland,
you know, and nature and the wildlife that lives there.
And I just fell into doing them. I've done like four of them
or something, four different series.
And, um...I like it. I get to be David Attenborough
but the Scottish version, you know, for a little bit,
which is nice. -You're very good at it,
but I do have a bone to pick with you,
which is, early in the pandemic,
when we were at our most stressed --
I'm stuck at home with my kids --
and my son has this book about birds.
He would pick a bird, and I'd try to find
a YouTube video of one of the birds.
We find the guillemot, and I start watching this video
of you narrating it, and I'm thinking,
"Ewan's not gonna lead me astray."
You know -- You remember this?
It's the most harrowing video I've ever seen.
-It's the most upsetting thing you'll ever have seen, yeah.
-So, let's just show what I'm watching
with my, at the time, 4-year-old son.
-Okay.
A razorbill makes a final attack.
[ Birds squawking ]
[ Gasps ]
Unable to steer, it's heading straight for the rocks.
Ohh!
[ Laughter ]
-I mean, that is the worst -- -No, no, but listen, listen.
But listen. What happens thereafter
is there's a shot of it coming out of the water
and climbing back up on the rock.
-Yeah. -Right?
-Well, I slammed the laptop shut.
[ Laughter ]
So I didn't see that part. -There is a shot
that they cut to before they see it coming back out.
Now, I know that might be because it's not the same bird
coming out of the water as when we just saw it
smashing off the rock, right? [ Laughter ]
So I said to the director, I said, "You got to promise me
that's the same bird 'cause I don't think
that's the same bird."
And he assures me that this is what happens in nature.
They fall off.
So how do they get down into the water?
Because the parents try and lure them down.
They're down there, coming, "Come on, son, jump!"
And the birds are quite rightly going, "[Bleep] that."
[ Laughter ] "I'm not doing that."
-Do you remember what the name of the young birds are called?
-No. -Jumplings.
-Excuse me? -They're literally called
jumplings, according to the narrator, which is you.
[ Laughter ]
Probably making it up on the fly.
-I know, it's so harrowing. But they're all of them --
Because there's such drama in nature,
and all of the series I've done, there's these --
You know, I'm in there, recording it, and often,
it's the first time I'll have seen it
is when I'm actually recording it.
There was one with killer whales and dolphins being --
Like, there's one of a dolphin kind of --
[ Laughing ] It's a huge -- He's got this huge fish,
and he can't get it down his neck.
And the fish is coming out of his mouth.
It's like a horror film! It's just horrendous.
Anyway, it's fun to do.
And, you know, it's a cruel world out there.
-It's a cruel world out there. It's also was a very cruel world
for all of us this year, and I read that you did one this year,
another documentary for the same production company,
in the sweltering heat of Los Angeles.
-Yes. It was a series called "The Stormborn."
Animals that are born in a storm, like, in Scotland
and Norway and all of that bad-weather area up there.
And they asked me to do it.
And, of course, then, we all got locked down.
And I was in L.A., and I couldn't get
to Scotland to do it, and he couldn't come over.
So I just said, "Look, you know, all of us --"
Like we're doing now, we had to adapt,
and, you know, keep going.
So I got this little sort of portable setup.
I was doing narrations for some other things.
You know, I was in post production
for our motorbike trip "Long Way Up"
that I did it with my friend Charley.
So I had the microphone setup and my laptop,
and I was able to sort of patch in
and do this kind of work, you know, narration stuff,
so I did it that way.
But I didn't -- I couldn't find --
There was nowhere that I could --
You know, I've got kids, and there was nowhere
I could find that was quiet enough
without risk of someone battering in
and, you know, disturbing the recording.
So I had this tiny little caravan.
-Sure. -And we call it a caravan
where I'm from, and there was this little caravan
over up in the corner.
And I managed to get in like a little Wi-Fi booster in there.
And I just sat in there, and I started --
I said to them, "It's gonna be fine.
I've got my setup." And we started in the morning,
and by about 11:00, I was absolutely dripping in sweat.
I couldn't -- 'Cause I couldn't put
my little air conditioner on because it was too noisy.
So I ended up in my underpants just sitting in my caravan
in my pants, speaking into my microphone
about the little jumplings. You know.
-Well, you're talking about Scottish winter storms.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that's -- I'm an actor.
-Yeah. -That's what we do, Seth.
-Everybody said, they're like,
"If anybody can do it, it's Ewan."
[ Laughter ] -Yeah.
Hey, this is really cool to play Halston.
Obviously, this is a very famous fashion designer,
and you got some time --
Or, I should say, you took some time
to get to know some people who knew him firsthand.
-Yes. I was really lucky.
I mean, there are some people in his world,
who kindly sat down with me, people he worked with.
But, you know, the most amazing friendship
he had was with Liza Minnelli.
And they had a really beautiful best friendship.
And I wanted to meet her.
I wanted to meet her anyway
and reassure her that he was in good hands --
he was in safe hands with me.
That I wanted her to know that I respected
their friendship, and I understood
that he was very important to her.
But I couldn't have imagined, you know, just how --
She asked me to keep our conversation private,
which I would always respect, but I got -- what she gave to me
was the great love she had for him,
and I could see through her,
you know, the great love he had for her.
So, it was a really beautiful --
And then, it was very shortly after I met Liza,
I went off and started playing Halston.
It's a responsibility, you know, when you're playing somebody
who's lived and to get him right.
And I was lucky that she was able
to share some of her memories of him with me.
-Yeah, I will say, insofar as having to do research
for a part, you can do a lot worse
than having to sit down with Liza Minnelli.
That seems like as good as it gets, as far as research.
-It was ama-- it was brilliant. It was brilliant.
It was such an honor to meet her.
I mean, really.
-It is always an honor to have you here.
I can't wait to see the show.
And we are gonna go out with a clip of the guillemot
crawling out of the water.
And then our viewers can go back and see
if they think it's the same bird.
-Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's 50/50, isn't it?
[ Laughter ] Or maybe even the odds
are slightly less than that. I don't know.
-"Halston" is available now on Netflix.
We'll be right back with more "Late Night."
-But guillemot chicks have dense, downy feathers.
And incredibly, it's unharmed by the fall.
Yeah, right.
[ Laughter ]
Oh, dear. [ Laughter continues ]
-Thanks, buddy. It's great to see you.
-It's great to see you, too, man. Cheers.